Berlin Area Debates Plan for Regional Government

Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, June 22, 1995

1995-06-22 04:00:00 PDT Brandenburg, Germany -- Berliners regard it as a marriage made in heaven: a proposed union between their city and the surrounding state of Brandenburg under a single regional government, creating a 10,000-square-

mile metropolitan superpower in the heart of Europe.

The merger, which will be voted on by legislators today, "would move us from the balcony to the front row in the German federal concert," says Brandenburg state President Manfred Stolpe.

But thousands of Stolpe's constituents are determined to leave Germany's largest city -- and since 1990, its official capital -- standing alone at the regional altar.

Their concerns are neatly summed up in a poster displayed in the leafy provincial city of Brandenburg, 40 miles west of Berlin. It features a huge bear (Berlin's traditional symbol) behind the wheel of a car, with a Brandenburg heraldic eagle slumped unhappily in the passenger seat.

"I know we bought this auto together, dear," the bear says, "but only one of us can steer it."

The debate over what Germans call "Zusammenschluss" -- literally "ending up together" -- echoes controversies that have embroiled several American communities seeking to form regional governments in recent years, most notably the San Francisco Bay Area, the Los Angeles region and metropolitan Seattle.

As in the United States, German regionalism pits efficient bureaucratic consolidation against local power, big-city sophistication against homely small-town values -- and, say the merger's advocates, the reality of a single economic region against an outmoded framework of rival, overlapping governments.

"We are competing with each other when we ought to be collaborating," said Michael Leu, executive director of the Berlin senate. "The real competition isn't between Berlin and Brandenburg's towns and cities. It is with other regions, like greater Stuttgart, or beyond Germany's borders in France and Britain."

Leu, who is Berlin's presiding spokesman in favor of Zusammenschluss, followed the Bay Area regionalism debate firsthand as a graduate student at the University of San Francisco in the early 1980s.

"The underlying psychology of our conflict is very similar," he said. "Like San Francisco, Berlin tends to be viewed by its neighbors as a city of arrogant know-it-alls who want to take over everything."

The roots of anti-consolidation sentiment lie deep in local history. In 1920, Berlin reached its contemporary limits in an earlier consolidation -- at the direct expense of Brandenburg -- when 13 towns and 59 villages were annexed by the city.

A generation later, thanks to Adolf Hitler's installation of major armaments plants in Brandenburg, the region attracted some of the heaviest Allied bombing raids in World War II. The communist regime that succeeded Hitler in Berlin, ruling East Germany from 1949 to 1990, obliterated Brandenburg state altogether and assigned its land to two other regions.

"Our relations with the capital in those years were not very comfortable," says Helmut Schliesing, mayor of Brandenburg city, the state's second largest community with 95,000 residents. "Berlin was a privileged area. Everything that we produced went there first, and then to Potsdam," he said, referring to the Berlin suburb where many Communist Party leaders lived. "After that, there wasn't much left."

It was only after German reunification that Brandenburg recovered its identity as a full-fledged state within the country's federal system.

Ironically, opposition to the proposed regional government is led by the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) -- the successor party to the Communists, who once declared Brandenburg a nonentity. They claim that Zusammenschluss is nothing more than a trick to foist the high cost of running Berlin on Brandenburg, replacing huge federal subsidies to the city that are scheduled to disappear at the decades's end.

Berlin now receives $1.35 from the federal government for every dollar it pays in taxes, which amounts to an annual subsidy of $4.5 billion. "The problem," says Leu -- in an observation that will be all too familiar to San Franciscans -- "is that rich taxpayers are moving their homes and businesses to the suburbs, but still taking advantage of our city's costly infrastructure."

Nonetheless, polls indicate that the PDS anti-regionalists have found a receptive audience in Brandenburg's increasingly jaded voters.

A focal point of their hostility is the likelihood of significant staff cutbacks in a region already troubled by joblessness.

The proposed Berlin-Brandenburg Treaty of Union, which has been under serious negotiation for two years, calls for a reduction of more than 40,000 civil service jobs in the region, from the present total of just over 200,000.

Today, the senates of both Berlin and Brandenburg vote on the agreement, which must be approved by two-thirds of each legislature to reach the next step -- a joint public referendum in nine months.

Berlin, with 3.5 million people to Brandenburg's 2.6 million, would have a clear edge at the ballot box. Unlike the senate tallies, the referendum requires a simple majority of the two areas combined. But the rub is that, by law, voter participation must be at least 25 percent of the total electorate.

"For ordinary people in the former East Germany, the basic questions right now have to do with things like unemployment and its impact on personal life," said Brandenburg's Mayor Schliesing."They don't understand how Zusammenschluss will effect those concerns, and they may well abstain from the election."

If the two senates vote for approval, an interim joint government will be formed January 1, 1996. But should the spring referendum then fail, sighs Leu, "it will all have to be broken down again, and we will be back to functioning with ad hoc,intercommunity contracts on every public service that crosses the city-state borders."

Currently, Berlin is ruled as a self-administered city-state completely surrounded by the state of Brandenburg. In addition to their separate elected legislatures, both governments have an extensive range of duplicate departments and agencies, covering everything from the judicial system and mass transit to medical care facilities and schools.

Since reunification, both also have invested billions of dollars in a vast rebuilding campaign, evidenced today by forests of cranes all over the landscape.

"What we don't know -- what the treaty of proposed union is extremely vague about -- is how much of this building may prove worthless," says Anne Brunink, director of external relations for the Technical University of Brandenburg.

"With a regional government, we'd certainly have to ask some tough questions," confirms Leu. "Do we need all of this building? Where should we cut back? Should we have a big coronary hospital in Potsdam if we already have one in Berlin?"

Such questions preoccupied many of the 198 artists who submitted political cartoons on the subject of Zusammenschluss to an exhibition sponsored by the Technical University this month.

A remarkable number of them explored the same visual metaphor: A ravenous Berlin bear devouring a trussed and spit-roasted Brandenburg eagle. "That's the danger I worry about -- that we'll simply be gobbled up," said Brunink.